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April 30, 2018

A defence deal expected to cost over Rs 2,000 crore to buy 20 Hawk
Advanced Jet Trainer planes is likely to be called off by the Air Force
as the negotiations for it have been stuck for almost three years now
over steep price hike by the vendors.

The Air Force is also not
interested in the upgrade of its fleet of over 120 Hawk planes that were
inducted into service after a deal with Britain in 2004. The HAL is
offering to upgrade the Hawk fleet of the Air Force to Hawk India jets
by adding combat capabilities, government sources told Mail Today.

"The
benchmark price of each aircraft was around Rs 90 crore but the initial
price offered by the vendors including the public sector Hindustan
Aeronautics Limited (HAL) was more than double," the sources said.

"In
the contract negotiations, the vendors have cut down the price but even
now, the price offered is more than 60 per cent of what the defence
ministry is willing to pay for the planes," they said.

Another
reason over which the deal may be called off is that due to government's
directive for utilising the funds optimally, the priority of the
ministry is to buy more of war fighting equipment rather than go in for
systems that do not fit that bill, the sources said.

On the
newly-developed Hawk India jet showcased by HAL recently, sources said
there was not much logic in going in for upgrade of IAF fleet of Hawk
planes which have been inducted not long back. "The last of the Hawks
were inducted only around three years ago in the force and the upgrades
are not required at this moment," the sources said.

The IAF had
moved the proposal to buy these 20 planes from a British firm during the
UPA regime as it wanted to replace the Kiran Mk 2 planes with the Hawk
Advanced Jet Training jets to be equipped with smoking pots to fly with
the Surya Kiran Aerobatic Team (SKAT).

The contract for the last
batch of 57 planes was done between India and the British firm in 2010
to help in the training programmes of the Air Force and the Navy to add
to the existing fleet of 66 planes bought in 2004.

The deal for
the 20 airplanes has gone through many problems earlier also as the file
related to the procurement case had mysteriously gone missing from a
department under the defence ministry in 2014 leading to a delay of more
than a year in completing the lapsed process.